The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

by Gessen, Masha

  ON THE EVENING of October 23, 2002, a couple of friends stopped by for a drink: I had a three-year-old and a one-year-old and was spending most of my evenings at home. The friends, one of whom was a television producer, suggested we turn on the television to watch a recently launched talk show that I had not yet seen. The show had barely begun when a breaking-news announcement interrupted it. A hostage crisis was under way in a Moscow theater. By this time I was editing a small independent political-analysis website, polit.ru. In the next three days I would get a total of about three hours of sleep: my reporters would take turns keeping vigil at the theater and I would be posting their news to our site.

  It was a little after nine in the evening when the siege of the theater began. The musical presented that night included a scene in which a real World War II–era airplane appeared onstage. It was then that masked men with machine guns came onstage and around the perimeter of the hall; for a few moments many in the audience thought it was all part of the show. There were about eight hundred people in the hall that night; with the exception of a few dozen young children and foreign citizens the hostage-takers soon released—and some of the actors, many of them also children, who managed to climb out a dressing room window—they would spend the next fifty-eight hours in the hall, growing exhausted, dehydrated, terrified, and ultimately desperate. Though they were ordered to surrender their cell phones to the terrorists, several of them managed to call the leading news radio station at different points during the crisis, so throughout the siege a city frozen in fear and anxiety around the theater heard voices from within it.

  Around seven in the morning on the third day of the siege, several cabinet officials entered the meeting hall at a nearby college where relatives of the hostages had spent most of the last three days. “They were very happy and excited,” one of the relatives later recalled. “They went up to the microphone. The room froze in silence. They said these sweet words: ‘The operation went off without a hitch.’ They said all the terrorists had been killed and there were no casualties among the hostages. The room broke into applause, screaming with joy. Everyone was thanking the authorities for saving their loved ones.” In this triumphant statement, everything was a lie.

  The Moscow theater siege is simultaneously one of the most successfully executed and one of the most absurdly botched hostage-rescue operations in history. Throughout the siege, the terrorists, who gave the impression of being disorganized and disoriented, continued negotiations with just about all comers—and kept gradually releasing some of the hostages. A motley crew of doctors, politicians, and journalists were allowed to go in and out of the building to negotiate better conditions for the hostages. Relatives of the hostages, desperately hoping for a peaceful resolution, gathered for a rally on the second day of the siege and produced a petition that they submitted with more than 250 signatures:

  Esteemed President:

  We are the children, relatives, and friends of hostages who are inside the theater. We appeal to your reason and mercy. We know that the building is mined and that the use of force will lead to the theater being blown up. We are certain that no concession is too great to grant when at issue are the lives of seven hundred people. We ask you not to allow people to die. Continue the negotiations! Accept some of their demands! If our loved ones die, we will no longer believe that our state is strong and its government is real. Do not let us be orphaned!

  A few hours later, one of our reporters called to say that a hospital right near the theater had been evacuated. The military were beginning to storm the building, I concluded, and were readying space for possible casualties.

  At 5:30 on Saturday morning, the third day of the siege, two of the hostages called Echo Moskvy, the city’s main news and talk station. “I don’t know what’s going on,” one of them sobbed into the phone. “There is gas. Everyone is sitting in the hall. We ask you, please, we just hope we are not another Kursk.” Unable to speak further, she passed the phone to her friend, who said, “It seems they are beginning to use force. Please don’t abandon us if there is a chance, we beg you.” It is heartbreakingly clear that neither the hostages nor their loved ones outside trusted the Russian armed forces to save them. The reference to the Kursk made it plain: they did not trust the government to have regard for human life.

  In fact, the rescue plan was brilliant: special forces used underground passages to fill the theater with gas that would make everyone inside fall asleep, preventing the terrorists from detonating the explosives planted around the hall—women dressed in black and apparently wearing vests packed with explosives were posted throughout. The sleeping terrorists could then be detained and the hostages freed by troops who would emerge from those same underground passages as well as enter the building through the front doors.

  None of it worked out as planned. It took several minutes for the terrorists to fall asleep. Why they did not set off the explosives was unclear, and led to speculation that there were no explosives at all. The hostages, sleep-deprived and severely dehydrated—at least in part because the two different special forces units stationed around the theater could not agree on letting pass a shipment of water and juice the terrorists had consented to accept—fell asleep quickly and required medical help to wake up. Instead of being given immediate medical attention, they were carried out of the building and laid on the steps of the theater, many of them on their backs rather than their sides, as they should have been. Many people choked to death on their own vomit, without ever gaining consciousness, right on the steps of the building. Then the dead and the merely unconscious alike were loaded onto buses, where, again, they were placed sitting up; on the buses, many more people choked to death when their heads flipped backward. Instead of being taken to the hospital next door, the hostages were transported, mostly by bus, to hospitals in central Moscow, where the doctors were helpless to aid them because the military and police authorities refused to tell them what kind of chemical had been used in the theater. Several of the hostages fell into a coma and died in the hospital, some as late as a week after the siege was over. In all, 129 people died.

  The government declared victory. Pictures of the terrorists, all of whom were summarily executed in their sleep by Russian troops, were repeatedly shown on television: men and women slumped in theater chairs or over tables, with visible gunshot wounds to their heads. When I wrote a piece on the disregard for human life the government had exhibited by declaring victory in the face of 129 unnecessary deaths, I received a series of death threats myself: the triumph over terrorism was not to be questioned. It was months before some human-rights activists dared point out that Russia had violated a series of international conventions and its own laws by using the gas and applying force when the terrorists were still willing to negotiate. Few Russians ever learned that the terrorists, led by a twenty-five-year-old who had never before been outside Chechnya, had advanced demands that would have been almost laughably easy to fulfill, possibly securing the release of all the hostages. They wanted President Putin publicly to declare that he wanted to end the war in Chechnya and to demonstrate his goodwill by ordering troop withdrawal from any one district of the breakaway republic.

  But for all the seeming simplicity of their demands, the terrorists were demanding that Putin act in a way that ran counter to his nature. The boy who could never end a fight—the one who would seem to calm down only to flare up and attack again—now the president who had promised to “rub them out in the outhouse,” would certainly rather sacrifice 129 of his own citizens than publicly say that he wanted peace. He did not.

  Just two weeks after the theater siege, Putin was in Brussels for a European Union–Russia summit devoted principally to the discussion of the international Islamic terrorist threat. At a press conference after the meetings, a reporter for the French newspaper Le Monde asked a question about the use of heavy artillery against civilians in Chechnya. Putin, looking calm and even smiling slightly with the corners of his mouth, said, “If you ar
e ready to become a radical adherent of Islam and you are ready to be circumcised, I invite you to come to Moscow. We are a country of many faiths. We have specialists in this. I will recommend that the operation be performed in such a way that nothing will ever grow there again.” The interpreter did not dare translate Putin’s response in full, and it did not even make it into the following day’s edition of The New York Times: the paper demurely translated his last sentence as: “You are welcome and everything and everyone is tolerated in Moscow.” But the video of him lashing out at the reporter was still viral on RuTube nine years after Putin made his threat—and demonstrated his utter inability even to pretend to consider a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Chechnya.

  ALEXANDER LITVINENKO was now living in a row house in North London, across a narrow street from Ahmed Zakaev, a former actor from the Chechen capital of Grozny, who had, in the late 1990s, become the intelligent, charming face of an independent Chechnya. He had been a key member of the post–cease-fire Chechen government and Chechnya’s representative in the West. In 2000 he was wounded and left Chechnya for medical treatment, and eventually he sought political asylum in Great Britain. Now he was living in North London on a stipend he received from his old negotiating partner, Boris Berezovsky—just like Litvinenko, who had spent much of the second half of the 1990s in Chechnya, on the side of the Russian troops. Zakaev’s surviving comrades considered him to be the prime minister of Chechnya in exile.

  Together, Litvinenko and Zakaev pored over documents and video footage of the theater siege and made a startling discovery: one of the terrorists had not been killed; in fact, he seemed to have left the building shortly before Russian troops stormed it. They identified the man as Khanpash Terkibaev, a former journalist who, they believed, had long been working for Russian secret police. On March 31, 2003, Zakaev saw Terkibaev in Strasbourg, where both had traveled for a meeting of the European Parliamentary Assembly as representatives of the Chechen people, Terkibaev sanctioned by Moscow and Zakaev not. In early April, Litvinenko sought out Sergei Yushenkov, the liberal colonel with whom Marina Salye had been co-organizing before she fled Moscow, who was now engaged in a parliamentary investigation of the theater siege, and gave him all the information he had collected on Terkibaev. It was two weeks later that Yushenkov was shot dead in Moscow in broad daylight. Litvinenko was certain this was a direct result of his theater siege investigation.

  But Yushenkov had already given the documents he received from Litvinenko to someone else. Anna Politkovskaya was a journalist in her mid-forties who had spent most of her professional life in relative obscurity, writing excessively researched and confusing pieces on all manner of social ills. During the second war in Chechnya she emerged as a recklessly brave reporter who would spend weeks on end in Chechnya, apparently oblivious of the Russian military’s restrictions, documenting allegations of abuse and war crimes. In a couple of years she had become easily the most trusted Russian among Chechens. Gray-haired, bespectacled, the mother of two grown children, she seemed a most unlikely muckraker or war reporter, which probably kept her safe on a number of occasions. During the theater siege, she was allowed to enter the building to attempt to negotiate with the terrorists, and she appears to have been instrumental in getting them to agree to allow water and juice to be delivered.

  Politkovskaya found Terkibaev, whom she said she recognized from her time inside the theater, and interviewed him. He turned out to be almost ridiculously vain, and she easily got him to boast of having been inside the theater during the siege, having led the terrorists there, having secured their passage in several vans loaded with arms through checkpoints in Chechnya and police outposts on the approach to Moscow, and of having had in his possession a detailed map of the theater, which both the terrorists and federal troops had lacked. Who was he working for? Moscow, he said.

  Politkovskaya drew her conclusions from the interview cautiously. Terkibaev lied a lot, this much was clear. There were also the facts: he had indeed been among the hostage-takers; he was still living; and he moved about freely, including as a member of official delegations abroad. It seemed his claim that he worked for one of the secret services had to be true. And he said one other important thing to Politkovskaya: the reason the terrorists had not set off their explosives, even when they felt the gas filling the hall—an unmistakable prelude to an attack on the building—was that there were no explosives. The women who had been stationed along the theater’s rows of seats, keeping an eye on the hostages and a finger on the button, were wearing dummy dynamite vests. If this was true—and there was every reason to think it was—then everyone who died in the siege died in vain. And, with Khanpash Terkibaev leaving the building before special forces stormed it, the Kremlin probably knew it too.

  ON JULY 3, 2003, a second member of the independent committee investigating the 1999 apartment building bombings died. Yuri Shchekochikhin, an outspoken liberal politician and a muckraking journalist—he was deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta and, as head of its investigative team, Politkovskaya’s immediate superior—had been hospitalized two weeks earlier with mysterious symptoms: he had been complaining of a burning sensation all over his body, and he had been vomiting. Within a week he was in a coma, skin all over his body had peeled off, and his hair had fallen out. He died of multiple organ failure caused by an unknown toxin. Doctors at Moscow’s best-equipped hospital, who diagnosed him with “allergic syndrome,” had been unable to slow his decline or significantly lessen his pain.

  Shchekochikhin had been working on so many investigations that his friends and colleagues, most if not all of whom believed he was murdered, were at a loss to suggest which of his suicide missions actually led to his death. Zakaev was certain that Shchekochikhin was murdered to prevent him from publishing information he had gathered on the theater siege: namely, evidence that some of the women terrorists were convicted felons who, on paper, were still serving sentences in Russian prisons at the time of the siege. In other words, their release had probably been secured by someone who had extralegal powers—and this, again, pointed to possible secret-police involvement in the organization of this act of terror.

  ON SEPTEMBER 1, 2004, as soon as news came of the school siege in Beslan, Politkovskaya, naturally, rushed to the airport to fly to North Ossetia. So did many other journalists, including the other reporter who was well-known in Chechnya, Andrei Babitsky—the man who had been kidnapped by Russian troops at the very beginning of Putin’s reign. Babitsky was detained at the airport in Moscow, ostensibly because he was suspected of carrying explosives; none were found and he was released, but he never made it to Beslan. Politkovskaya registered for three consecutive flights, each of which was canceled before it could board, and finally got a seat on a plane to Rostov, the largest city in southern Russia, about four hundred miles from Beslan; she was planning to cover the rest of the way by hired car. Her plan was to act not only as a reporter but also, as much as she could, as a negotiator, as she had two years earlier, during the theater siege. Before leaving Moscow, she had spoken extensively with Zakaev in London, urging him to mobilize any and all Chechen leaders to attempt to talk to the terrorists and negotiate the release of the children. She suggested that rebel leaders should come out of hiding to take on this job, setting no conditions of their own. Zakaev had agreed.

  Ever careful—by this time Politkovskaya was the target of constant death threats, and she had seen her editor, Yuri Shchekochikhin, die of poisoning—Politkovskaya brought her own food onto the airplane and asked only for a cup of tea. Ten minutes later, she lost consciousness. By the time the plane landed, she was in a coma. That she was able to come out of it was, in the opinion of doctors who treated her in Rostov, a miracle. Doctors in Moscow, where she was transported two days later, ultimately concluded she had been poisoned with an undisclosed toxin that did severe damage to her kidneys, liver, and endocrine system.

  POLITKOVSKAYA, who took months to recover and never fully regained her health, was ef
fectively prevented from covering and investigating the tragedy in Beslan. Other people took up this challenge. These investigators included Marina Litvinovich, Putin’s former image-maker. She had quit her job at the Kremlin’s pocket political consultancy after the theater siege, not so much because she disagreed with the FSB’s handling of it as because she had been kept off the crisis team. She dabbled in opposition politics just as the opposition effectively ceased to exist, went to work for oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was promptly arrested, and had wandered into Beslan looking for a way to apply her considerable skills and connections.

  “I was scared to go,” she told me. “I had never been to the Caucasus.” She was too embarrassed to tell me exactly what she had expected, but it seemed she was very much a product of ten years of wartime propaganda, which she herself had helped to create: the last thing she expected to find so close to Chechnya were people like herself. “We went from family to family, from home to home where people had lost children, and everywhere we went, they poured us a ‘memorial’ shot of vodka. And everyone cried, and I cried, and I cried my eyes out in Beslan. And they just told me their stories and they cried and they asked for help. By that time everyone in Russia seemed to have forgotten about Beslan, so anyone who came, they asked for help. They did not know what kind of help, and at first I did not know, either. I told them banal things, I told them they should organize. It was a strange thing to say to women who had spent their lives making homes—who, if they had a job outside the home, maybe worked at a family store. And gradually I started spending time there, working on a few issues. We created an organization. Then we started collecting eyewitness accounts. And then the trial began.”

  As with the theater siege, most of the hostage-takers had been summarily executed by Russian troops. By official count, there was a single survivor, and this time he was put on trial. Hearings would go on for two years, and the man’s testimony and, more important, eyewitness testimony painted another damning picture of the Russian government’s handling of and possible involvement in the hostage crisis. Conducted in tiny Beslan and attended mostly by grief-stricken local residents, the trial would have passed in utter obscurity had Litvinovich not done a simple thing. She made sure every session was audiotaped and the transcript was posted on a website she called The Truth About Beslan.